Design-to-cost process - aircraft cabins

The company designs, develops and produces cabin linings and luggage compartments for commercial aircraft, individually designed VIP aircraft cabins, rest areas for pilots and flight attendants as well as air supply systems. Its partners include major aircraft manufacturers such as Airbus, Boeing and Bombardier.

Turnover: 650 Mio. €

Employees: 2.100

Client: CEO

The initial situation

Our customer was in the midst of a transformation: from a pure manufacturing plant to a supplier within the group of companies that was responsible for results. The organization was still highly functional - a project-oriented way of working had not yet been established. A suitable product development process that would do justice to the new role as a supplier was still lacking. As a result, it was always difficult to achieve the targeted manufacturing costs for the assemblies in previous projects.

The task

Developing and establishing a design-to-cost process.

The procedure

Together with managers and employees, we worked out and implemented the potentials and solutions:

• Conducting 15 interviews with various knowledge carriers from management, program management, engineering and controlling
• Recording the relevant process steps in the offer and development process
• Sharpening awareness of the problem
• Recording the actual product development process
• Identifying the process steps that influence manufacturing costs
• Cause-and-effect chain analysis for the problems experienced along the process
• Development of the solution approaches
• Defining the implementation initiatives
• Describing the process steps relevant to manufacturing costs in the management manual
• Establishing a manufacturing cost reporting structure
• Consistently carry out gate reviews with manufacturing cost status queries
• Roll out the DFMA tool
• Provision of personnel skills and capacities

Joint work in expert workshops